Anne Lamott quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Anne Lamott on Wise Famous Quotes.

Because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline ... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

We do endure, and that out of the wreckage something surprising will rise.

There is so much mercy around us and in us, so much available to us if we just have the eyes and intention to see it.

When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love
(April 2012, O Magazine)

When we search for something larger than our own selves to hook into, we can come through whatever life throws at us.

What fills us is real, sweet, dopey, funny life.

When I was a kid, our family used to watch 'Bonanza.' I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.

My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.

Sometimes grace works like water wings when you feel you are sinking.

She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.

Resentments make even the best of us feel superior.

I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.

Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.

The single most radical thing I know ... is that I get to take care of myself.

I'm probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)

his cell phone - the adolescent's pacemaker.

It feels like I'm babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and diet cokes.

Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.

No one can appropriate God, goodness, the Bible or Jesus. It just seems that way.

She lived in fear of ifonic endings.

The way I dance is by writing.

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

If you don't believe in what you are saying, there is no point in your saying it. You might as well call it a day and go bowling.

telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat. Some

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

I let my mind wander.

Everything takes me forever. It's all lurch, flail. I hope that is good news to you writers.

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped.

Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all my best skills, intentions, and good ideas.

I decided to go to the beach at San Quentin, and practice living as if today was one of the precious few left to me. What a concept.

When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids.

Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before.

I think Jesus is divine love manifest on Earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.

Gratitude is peace.

I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me.

When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.

Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.

I would seriously rather be in a long line at the DMV than eat with people I don't know.

and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear...

God can't clean the house of you when you're still in it.

You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.

I am all the ages I've ever been.

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.

Dancing almost always turns out to be a good idea.

She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

If you want to know how God feels about money, look at whom she gives it to.

In fact, there's really only one thing that everything's made of; it's energy.

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?

Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

We're Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.

It's funny where we look for salvation, and where we actually find it.

But in surrender you have won.

If God was giving me a ham, I'd be crazy not to receive it. Maybe it was the ham of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You'll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.

If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.

If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.

We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and utility we have on hand.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

After a few days at the desk, telling the truth in an interesting way turns out to be as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat.

How do you begin? The answer is simple: you decide to.

Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.

Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one.

I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us.

I've seen prayers answered. But often, in my experiences, if you get what you pray for, you've really shortchanged yourself.

Believing in George Bush was so ludicrous that believing in God almost seems rational.

He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.

I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.

Jesus was soft on crime. He'd never have been elected anything.

Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.

Everyone was on God's payroll, whether they knew it or not.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while

A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much.

The redwoods are like organ pipes, playing silent chords.

The trees are so huge that they shut you up.

This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing ... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.

I do believe that God is with us even when we're at our craziest and that this goodness guides, provides, and protects.

She walked to the front door. 'Hello?'
'Hello,' a woman's voice said.
'Are you a Witness?'
'I swear to God I didn't see a thing.

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.

Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer.

We're individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found.

It's better to be kind than to be right.

Joy is the best makeup.

Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

I tell you, families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness.

Do you think that we're wired this way? With the devil inside?" "Yeah, in the same way we're wired for God. But not to the same extent.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

A hundred years from now?
All new people.

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.